COVID-19 vaccine not advisable for pregnant and breast-feeding women – PTF

Professor of Virology, Oyewale Tomori, says it is medically not advisable for pregnant women and lactating mothers to receive Covid vaccines.

Tomori, who is the Chairman, Expert Review Committee on COVID-19, stated this on Friday in a video posted on Twitter by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19.

Amongst globally known Covid vaccines brands are Pfizer/BioNTech, Oxford–AstraZeneca, Moderna and Sputnik V.

The don said, “For now, we don’t have any evidence for that because the trials that were done did not include pregnant women and lactating mothers. So, we cannot tell you how it is going to react in them.

“However, if we go by the past, I will give you an example, in 1985, ’86, around that time, we had this huge epidemic of yellow fever in Nigeria and we vaccinated everybody.

“At that time, inadvertently, a lot of pregnant women were also vaccinated against that virus but then, we followed them up for three, four years and there was nothing untoward that happened to them.

“So, ideally, there shouldn’t be any reason why we should have that but then, you are taking precaution, until you test it, you cannot be sure of what is going to happen.

“In dealing with pregnant women, ordinarily, when there is no epidemic, you don’t want to give it to them because you don’t know what is going to happen to the fetus.

But in an epidemic, when the mother is also exposed to that disease, and she gets sick and she dies, the fetus will also die, and therefore you give a vaccine during a raging epidemic to the women in the hope that even if the baby does not survive, the mother will at least survive.”

There have been talks about Covid vaccines in Nigeria with the Federal Government saying it expects to receive 100,000 doses of Covid vaccines anytime soon.